Bleachers

I just read, in one sitting, John Grisham's recanting of a high school football team's coming together over the impending death of their coach.  All the memories, good and bad, came to the surface as they reminiced about what it meant to belong to that school, that community and that tradition.

Though I pray death for none of my former coaches, that book could easily have been written about me as a GACS Spartan or Lipscomb University Bison.  So much of who I am today was forged on the basketball courts of Atlanta, GA, and Nashville, TN.  The best friends I have in the world are still the guys I ran, sweated, vomited, celebrated and lamented with for the many years I was a "real" basketball player on some very real basketball teams.

As a father now, I really don't know what the role of sports will be in my children's lives.  With a 5 year old and 2 year old son, and another unknown gender on the way, I have never coached them nor do I envision coaching them.  Doesn't mean I won't.  Just means I am not ordering my life around it.  If I don't, where will they learn to work together?  To win?  To lose?  To get up?  To fall down?  Those lessons can be learned of course void of team sports.  Many a band member, dancer, martial arts practioner and Cub Scout have learned the same lessons I learned dribbling, passing and shooting a basketball.  It does not have to be through sport that boys become men.  It's just that in my family, it was that way with me and my brother.

I'm not worried about it really.  I don't plan to lose any sleep over it now or later.  It will just be interesting to see what ties my children together with their friends long after their days of school or college are over with.  If not sport, then what? 

Honestly, I can't wait to find out...